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NOAA's Klimavicz keeps systems primed, ready to handle disaster needs

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August 12, 2010 -- It's been a busy summer for Joe Klimavicz, and really it's just getting started.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief information officer and director of high performance computing and communications has been ensuring public and private sector experts have climate data available to deal with the oil spill in the Gulf.

And now, Klimavicz is dealing with hurricane season, which kicked off June 1.

Klimavicz says it's a good thing that NOAA has been upgrading its systems on an ongoing basis to deal with the increase need of climate data.

In preparation for Hurricane season, NOAA, which experiences two to 12 times the amount of traffic during a weather event, upgraded and added capacity its Web server farm to handle the demand.

It also has seen a 150 percent increase each year in how much data the public has downloaded from its site. So it keep up with that demand, NOAA is using four different data centers and tripled its commodity Internet access to share information faster and more reliably.

Klimavicz says he also is concerned about how quickly climate scientists can find and share data. To that end, NOAA is using money from the Recovery Act to develop N-Wave, a new high speed nationwide data network.

While it's still in the early stages, Klimavicz says the infrastructure will let 80 terabytes of climate research data per day. It will be a 10G connection and it will use Internet 2.